Literary Analysis: Nature of Duplicity in The Cask of Amontillado
by 01BlackCat10
Summary: "The Cask of Amontillado" is analyzed/critiqued with regards to the duplicity present throughout the story using the New Criticism approach. Rated T to be safe.


_Another English class assignment. I actually wrote this a few years ago when I was in middle school, but I've significantly edited/revised it. Well, this is a literary analysis of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado," a very wonderful story. This analysis employs the use of the New Criticism approach. As can be garnered from the title, I focus on the nature of and emphasis on duplicity throughout the story_

**Literary Analysis: The Nature of Duplicity in "The Cask of Amontillado"**

In Edgar Allan Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado," when Montresor decides that it is time to seek revenge for the "thousand injuries of Fortunato," he does not make his feelings known. Although the honor code of the day might have called for a public challenge and a duel to the death, Montresor decides that he will not give "utterance to a threat". Instead, while he waits for his opportunity, he behaves as though nothing is wrong: "It must be understood, that neither by word nor deed had I given Fortunato cause to doubt my good will. I continued, as was my wont, to smile in his face, and he did not perceive that my smile _now_ was at the thought of his immolation." Montresor's behavior is duplicitous, concealing his true motives and feelings beneath a deceptive exterior. As the story progresses, it becomes clearer that the other side of Montresor's personality is not the smiling face he offers to Fortunato.

"The Cask of Amontillado" is filled with twins and opposites. The characters' names, for example, bounce off each other, two echoes of the same idea. The name "Montresor" carries the idea of "treasure," and "Fortunato" implies "fortune." As the two men walk along the damp passageway, Montresor offers Fortunato two bottles of wine: Medoc, thought to have medicinal powers and promising to "defend us from the damps," and De Grave, a wine whose name means "of the grave." Just afterward, Fortunato makes a "gesticulation," a secret gesture that demonstrates that he is a member of the Free and Accepted Masons, a secret fraternal order. In response, Montresor produces a trowel from beneath his cloak, a sign that he, too, is a mason but of a different, deadly variety.

As the story opens, the men seem more different than alike. Montresor is cold, calculating, and sober in every sense of the word. Fortunato greets him with "excessive warmth, for he had been drinking much". Montresor wears a black mask, a short cloak and a rapier or sword, the very image of a distinguished gentleman. Fortunato, on the other hand, is dressed for "the supreme madness of the carnival season" in motley, the jester's costume, complete with "tight-fitting parti-striped" clothing and a pointed cap with jingling bells at the tip. A drunken man with bells on his hat seems no match for Montresor, and it is hard to imagine Fortunato as "a man to be respected, and even feared" as he sways and staggers and fixates on the prospect of tasting more wine, the Amontillado.

Montresor continues his duplicity. He suggests that Luchesi could taste the wine instead of Fortunato, knowing that the suggestion will make Fortunato all the more eager to taste it himself. He repeatedly fusses over Fortunato's health, proposing that they ought to turn back before the foul air makes his "friend" ill, when in fact, he intends that Fortunato will never leave the catacombs alive. He emphasizes the ways in which they are opposites: "You are rich, respected, admired, beloved; you are happy, as once I was. You are a man to be missed. For me it is no matter."

Up to this point, even the conversation between the two establishes their different purposes. Looking over Montresor's shoulders, the reader is aware of the irony when Fortunato says, "the cough is a mere nothing; it will not kill me. I shall not die of a cough" and Montresor replies, "True – true." Although Montresor's plans have not yet been revealed, the reader knows with growing certainty that Fortunato will die. When Montresor and Fortunato share the therapeutic Medoc, Fortunato drinks "to the buried that repose around us," and Montresor replies, "And I to your long life."

From this point, things begin to change. Montresor's determination to hold himself as unlike Fortunato slips, and he becomes more like him with every step, as the wine works its effect on both of them. "The wine sparkled in his eyes and the bells jingled. My own fancy grew warm with the Medoc." Previously, Fortunato had taken Montresor's arm twice to steady himself as they walked. Now Montresor returns the gesture, "I made bold to seize Fortunato by an arm above the elbow." When they reach the end of the final passageway, Poe presents a flurry of twos: two men in "the interval between two of the colossal supports" confronted with "two iron staples, distant from each other about two feet". But as soon as Montresor fastens the padlock on the chain around Fortunato's waist, the two are one.

Now, when Fortunato speaks, Montresor echoes his words. "The Amontillado!" Fortunato cries out, and Montresor replies, "True, the Amontillado." "Let us be gone," says Fortunato, and Montresor replies, "Yes, let us be gone." "For the love of God, Montresor!" cries Fortunato. "Yes," Montresor says, "for the love of God!" Montresor becomes unnerved when Fortunato abruptly stops the game, when he refuses to speak any more. "I harkened in vain for a reply. I grew impatient." Why does Montresor wish Fortunato to keep speaking? Why does he shine his torch inside, hoping for a response? It is when he gets no answer except "only a jingling of the bells" that his heart grows sick.

The most chilling moment in the story happens, surely not coincidentally, at midnight (the time when the two hands of the clock are in one place), when the two men transcend human speech and communicate their oneness in another voice. Fortunato begins it with "a succession of loud and shrill screams, bursting suddenly from the throat of the chained form." At first, Montresor does not know how to respond to this communication. He moves "violently back," hesitates, trembles. He waves his rapier around, fearing that Fortunato is coming for him, but is reassured at the touch of the solid walls. "The thought of an instant," the realization that Fortunato is tightly bound, makes Montresor feel safe, and his reaction is dramatic and bizarre: "I reapproached the wall. I replied to the yells of him who clamored. I reechoed – I aided – I surpassed them in volume and in strength." It is difficult to imagine the sounds produced by two men, enemies and opposites, hundreds of feet underground howling at midnight in a damp stone chamber. Surely the volume and the echoes would not yield two distinct voices, but one grotesque sound. In that moment, the two are one.

After the wall is completed, fifty years pass before Montresor tells the story. What has he learned in the intervening years? Has he felt remorse? For most of the story, Montresor's language is clear and direct. In the story's opening paragraph, told fifty years after the crime, the language is uncharacteristically convoluted and opaque: "A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong." Pause is prompted at these lines, as one stops to sort out the redresser and the redressed from the redressee. If the roles are confusing, it is because in Montresor's mind, the lines between avenger and victim are no longer distinct. When Montresor speaks the story's last line, "In pace requiescat" ("rest in peace"), is he speaking of Fortunato or of himself? By the end of the story, the two are so connected that it is all the same.


End file.
